The man in black lounged in the shadows of his padded booth, watching a long blue and yellow train slip out of view under the structure of the central railway station across the canal. The air around him was thick with smoke and the scent of strong coffee. He glanced down at his own coffee cup, pondering the white lines of congealed cream twisting through the syrupy black brew, which had gone cold in the time he had waited. He wished that he could drink the coffee, but he did not yet trust his body to properly digest anything stronger than water and bland wheat crackers. 

A waitress pushed through the haze and eyed the man’s cup. 

“Can I get you anything else?” the waiter asked in Danish.

He shook his head, no. 

The waitress swallowed hard and, with visible effort, succeeded in looking at the man’s face without fixating on the puckered skin stretched across the man’s skull. “Perhaps a pastry?”

The man gave a long sigh that was almost a hiss and tilted his wretched face towards the waitress. Dim red light fell upon his misshapen nose and cast deep shadows into the hollows of his cheeks. He replied in flawless Dutch, his words punctuated with sharp pauses, “Do I look like I want a pastry?”

The waitress scurried back to the safety of the cigarette counter by the front window, silently cursing her supervisor for prompting her to check on the man who had now occupied the booth at the rear of the coffee shop for over an hour.

The man in black curled his mouth into a cruel smile and returned to watching trains come and go across the canal through the forest of patrons, mostly tourists by their languages, who drifted in and out through the door. 

Another hour passed before the woman he was waiting for arrived. Dressed in a sleek black dress that clung to her curves and a knee length jacket of wine red leather, she immediately captured the attention of half the customers when she swept through the door. She strode directly to the back table, shrugged out of her coat, and slid onto the bench opposite the man in black.

“Took you long enough,” the man growled.

She ignored him and waved for a waiter. The timid waitress who had proffered baked goods returned and took the woman’s order, then hurried away without even asking the man if he wanted anything.

“He’s an old man, it took a while for him to say his goodbyes.”

The man in black laughed bitterly and tapped at the side of his coffee cup with a single long finger. “Where is he going?”

The woman shook her blond head and wagged a finger in the air between them. “Not yet. First you pay, then I share your old friend’s pillow talk.”

“Haven’t you already been paid?”

“Funny, but no. It might surprise you, but I actually like the old fool.”

“And yet here we sit.”

The woman nodded silently and chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then caught herself and shrugged. “I’m a business woman. The old fool tells good stories and brews the best beer I’ve ever had, but in the end I’m just another one of his women.”

“Indeed you are,” the man said. “It may ease your guilt to know that if our mutual friend had not stopped in Amsterdam to visit you, then I would doubtless be having this conversation with one of his paramours in Berlin, or Copenhagen, or any number of other cities across Europe.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she spit back. “You don’t have to rub it in my face.”

“And we were just talking about how professional you are. You aren’t developing an emotional attachment to him, are you? Those can be dangerous in your line of work.”

She opened her mouth to curse him, but bit it back when the waitress approached their table with a small tray and set it in front of her. She paid, then inserted a long white cigarette between her lips, lit it with practiced ease, and inhaled deeply.

“A surprising choice,” the man said, nodding at her cigarette.

She held the cigarette between finger and thumb to examine it, then shrugged and let out of stream of white smoke from between pursed lips. “You wouldn’t understand. All you Americans can think of in Amsterdam is our sex and drugs, but if you truly understood European culture you’d realize that good tobacco is just as alluring when it is difficult to get.”

“I’m not an American.”

She raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

The man leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, bringing his scarred face into the light, then intertwined his fingers and said, “We’re getting off track. Where is he going?”

“Payment.”

“Of course.”

“Now.”

He sighed and pulled a large cell phone from his coat pocket. He tapped at it a few times as the woman studied the pattern of shadows the glowing screen cast across his wrecked features. Somehow, though she wouldn’t have sworn to it, his face seemed marginally less damaged than it had when she sat down.

He set the phone on the tabletop and said, “Enter your account number here, then press send.”

She took a long drag on the cigarette, watching his face carefully, then shook her head and picked up the phone. After a moment she said, “That was only half of what we agreed upon.”

“That’s right. Tell me what I want to know and you’ll get the rest, keep delaying the issue while he gets away from me and the police will find you dead in a canal.”

“It’s not nice to make threats.”

“I’m not threatening you,” he said, his voice level.

She tried to look into his eyes, but quickly averted her gaze. The man’s eyes glinted black like chips of obsidian in his head, cold and hard between the wrinkles of scarred flesh. 

The woman tapped the icon to initiate the transfer to her Swiss account, then set the phone on the tabletop and took a long drag from her cigarette. She held the smoke for a moment, then let it out in a long stream from her nose. She lifted her leather coat from the seat beside her and shrugged it over her shoulders, more for the comforting weight than to ward off any chill, then reached into an inner pocket and produced a sheet of paper.

“I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. He’s going to Sweden to meet a man named Oliver.”

“You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.”

“I know where they are meeting.”

“Better. And when?”

“That’s all here.”

“Hand it over,” he said, holding a hand out to her. The skin of the hand was oddly patterned with a mottled scrawl of old scars and the nails were painfully short, as if they had all been ripped away and were only now beginning to regrow. 

She hesitated, clutching the folded paper to her belly and chewing on her lower lip again. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?”

“That’s not your concern. I’m sure that you’ll find another wealthy old man to lean on at all the parties and pay for whatever designer clothes he wants to take off of you.”

She crumpled the paper in her fist and threw it at the man’s chest, but it spiraled awkwardly through the air and he had to snatch it before it fell to the floor. He unfolded it read the words, which had been written across the paper in precise lines with an expensive pen, and smiled. He pulled his phone back and tapped at the screen a few times, then set the device on the table before her and read the paper again, even though he had already memorized it.

“Take your silver and go. If you can ever be of service again, you know how to contact me.”

The woman completed the fund transfer and dropped the phone to the tabletop, then stood, slipped her arms into the sleeves of her coat, and glared down at the man. “I hope you burn in hell,” she spat.

The man gave her a thin smile and tucked the paper into the folds of his dark woolen coat before saying, “Have no fears on that regard, my lady. I’ve known far worse.”

She flicked the butt of her cigarette at him and stalked out of the coffee shop. 

The man in black chuckled, deep in his throat, and gathered himself to rise and follow her out the door. He had a long journey ahead of him to catch up with Oliver and Odin at the gates of Värmd.

Next Chapter: Lake Vänern